What Does "Agender" Really Mean?
This post comes from a comment made by u/Vic_GQ in my poll about gender identities:
Maybe the question you're trying to ask is less "do you have a gender identity?" and more "do you beleive in gender identities?"
Agender people don't have gender identities, but they do generally beleive that everybody else has one.
I can see how this is very different from the "I don't have a gender identity because that's not even a thing" crowd that you may be trying to seperate out in this poll.
If you've not yet answered the poll, go do that now. It's also relevant to the question about who actually experiences a gender identity - only people with gender dysphoria ("an internal sense of distress about ones birth sex" is a good working definition) or everyone, gender dysphoric or not. That poll is here, and you should also vote in it to help answer that question.
When I say "I don't have a gender identity", what I mean is that I think of myself as a woman much like I think of myself as a white, upper-middle class American.
- I'm a light-skinned person of mostly Northwestern European descent.
- I've had a white collar professional job in a high-paying field almost all of my adult life, and my parents provide us a nice upper-ish middle-class upbringing.
- I was born and raised in the US, and I'm loyal to what I believe are the ideals of this country.
- I experience all the good and bad things of being a female and people readily accept that I'm female, and women are just female people.
The most common question about identities like "agender", "non-binary" and "genderfluid" (and I'm sure there are many more -- I would argue that if "gender" is a purely internal concept, there are actually an infinite number of genders) is "what does that really mean?" I'm not going to get into those other identities, just "agender" for the time being because there is an unanswered question about the difference between "agender" as an actual well-formed identity and "agender" as a state of not having an internal identity.
Just to get the poll link out there, and not just as part of a sentence, here's the poll in question -
And again, if you've not yet voted, please go do so. The reason I'm asking is because it goes directly to the question of what "agender" as an identity is.